Some new little friends

Riding high on the success of the homelab migration, I started thinking about what my original vision had been for the homelab, years ago, in the 2010s. I’d pictured a single brain with digital tentacles snaking through the walls and lighting up every corner of the house as part of one expanded digital brain.

I’d realized much of this with Home Assistant, for sure, and Google Home let us pretend we owned a whole home brain and voice. But there was still something very dull about how the homelab had landed as a rack of computers tucked in a corner, with everyone relying on Google TV dongles and speakers rather than talking with our actual house. Now I had a vocabulary to express that whole house vision, liken with follower nodes of any size, exposing hardware devices over DRA for special cases.

The first target for me was our zigbee2mqtt and NUT devices on those Raspberry Pi 2s. With a couple of very low-end mini PCs, they joined as the first non-leader nodes and the Kubernetes DRA system lets me express exactly why the workloads land on the same machines that the UPS and Zigbee radios are attached to.

That entire operation took less than a couple hours, and I realized that there was really no going back.